Telecom Industry Getting Killed Because of Rock Bottom Tariffs & High Consumption: Sunil Bharti Mittal

Telecom Leader Sunil Bharti Mittal said a combination of rock-bottom tariffs and high consumption is killing the telecom industry and sector regulator Trai needs to urgently intervene to strike a balance between the needs for protecting investments and consumer interest.

"But, I think we need to have a balance between the requirement of investments and consumer on the other side," Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti Airtel, told media after a pre-Budget meeting between Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and corporate leaders.

"My view is Rs 200 ARPU (average revenue per user) is eventually going to Rs 300 ARPU. At the lower end, Rs 100 for a customer over a month of consuming rich data, voice and other services and on the upper-end Rs 450-500, therefore, blended eventual landing point of Rs 300 a month, which will still be USD 4 a month, by far, the lowest anywhere in the world and yet consuming two or three times more data than anywhere else in the world," Mittal said.

The industry needs to get to that balance, he said adding that Trai needs to work on this as the industry "has not been able to have an orderly mechanism to get to that point".

"We are unnecessarily killing this industry in a manner and way that is not conducive for our industry, and that's why we need Trai intervention," he said.